Beyond factories and farming--what?

These days my tutor Xiaodan looks unusually ragged, and I think I know why.

The week after National Day, Xiaodan listened patiently to my story about climbing JinYun mountain before proceeding to tell me about clothes shopping with her roommate. That clothes discussion mushroomed into one that has lasted for weeks. You see, Xiaodan’s roommate was shopping for interview clothes. She was one of hundreds of students climbing the steps each day last month to the impressive building on campus where employers from all over China were interviewing prospective employees. Xiaodan, too, has been taking various exams, hoping for a shot at an interview herself. Competition is tight, as a masterpiece of understatement.

These conversations have left me wondering what “competition” means when resources and jobs really are so finite, so limited. And just what is everyone competing for? Between factories and farming—what kinds of jobs exist?

 Competition ideally is based on merit, and nobody has done more than China to establish a merit-based system to select prospective employees, with an imperial exam system tracing back to the Han Dynasty. And, perhaps, nobody knows better than China what the strengths and perils of such a system are—the exam system has been critiqued throughout the centuries, and occasionally abolished, because of abuses, backwardness, and excessive focus on memorization.

“Bill” comes to visit nearly every week and describes studying for his college entrance exam, the notorious “gaokao.” To give him a chance at doing well, his father had paid for “Bill” to be placed in the B class at his high school of 1300, a class of only 70 students. The A class, allegedly more selective, had only 30 students, while a thousand some students milled around together in various C classes. Whether it was the advantage of being in a slightly selective class, allegedly with better teachers, or because “Bill” studied so hard, he placed 30^th in his whole class on the “gaokao.” But what was the price? He recalls studying until 2:00 every night and getting up at 5:30 in the morning throughout his junior year, the worst, because of the pressure he felt to not shame his parents. He described his crying classmates, the ones who were not among the rich kids who just played video games.

High school students compete mightily to get into good schools, and college graduates compete just as intensively for jobs. But what happens to those who never got a good “gaokao” score, who never go to university? What is there between factories and farming and the most sought-after professional jobs in China?

“Ryan” and “Ann” came to make dumplings one Saturday, and “Ryan” happened to describe a recent trip home and the strange feeling of visiting with old high school classmates, some of those who didn’t make it into college, many of them deep into drugs. Xiaodan’s roommate, the one who had been shopping for clothes, is determined along with her “left-behind” brother to avoid the fate of their parents and uncles who work in a faraway shoe factory, earning too little to come home for the most important event in the year, Spring Festival. No amount of studying was too much in her eyes. In my last conversation with Xiaodan, I learned that her roommate's efforts were rewarded--she did land a high school teaching job.

I hear more stories about east-coast factories, knowing that China has just  witnessed the largest human migration in history, although this internal migration from rural rice paddies to urban jobs hasn’t involved crossing any borders. On one hand, this migration has jolted the economy and, at least indirectly, brought many people out of poverty. On the other hand, the class divide has sharpened, as it has in the US as well. I see poor people working dirt cheap—just today I saw a dozen little men pulling weeds in one of Southwest University’s many celebrated gardens. Surely, for so many to be working in that one little spot, they weren’t being paid much.

And, I’ve come to realize that the job problem in China is partly the lack of service sector jobs, at least relative to those in most developed countries.  I understand that most economies follow a path from agriculture/mining based economies to industrial to post-industrial-or-service based ones. A majority of the jobs in the US are jobs in the service sector, but a much, much smaller fraction of available jobs in China are in the service sector. That is—there isn’t so much to choose from between farming at one end of the spectrum and professional jobs at the other. There are jobs, such as teaching and working for the government, but those jobs are fiercely fought over. Business opportunities are growing, but they are still relatively limited. So what do you do?

You knock yourself out studying, you endure, and you hope that some good will come of it.

Class was canceled for all the seniors in my department one week not long ago so that they could attend a series of lectures on making the most of it in a tight job market. Few of them have secured jobs yet and most of them are worried.

Xiaodan, too, a graduate student in linguistics, is looking paler than usual. She laughed before taking the train to her last exam—why worry? She knew she couldn’t possibly do well enough to secure one of the three government positions that students were competing for. Hundreds had enrolled in the exam. Some exams last for hours, with sub-sections on language, math, physics, and more. She would just randomly circle letters on the multiple-choice questions in some sub-sections—for example the one with 40 questions to complete in 35 minutes.

 As for me, sitting in a Chinese class every day, I find that the frequent quizzing is motivational IF I’m mostly competing against myself. I, too, will be facing exams in a month. Those will be another story. Speed is not my forte. But, really, I have nothing to lose. This is all gravy for me--I've got my degrees and had my job.

Under ideal conditions, a little competition isn’t a bad thing. I itch for it. But. I’m grateful I could  go to school in a time and place when I didn’t have to face such incredibly fierce competition.

I wish my students the best.